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Please consider to include the information what AF level was used into the graphs. This is something all recent reviews here have have been lacking.

About the image quality: The shimmering was greatly reduced with the fixed driver (78.03). So it's down to NV40 level now. But 3dCenter.de[1] and Computerbase.de conclude that only enabling "high quality" in the Forceware brings comparable image quality to "A.I. low". Perhaps you find the time to explore this issue in the image quality tests.

Please welcome Randi Sica as our newest reviewer at AnandTech. Randi is a friend who is well known in the Extreme Overclocking community as Mr. Icee. That gives Randi a keen eye when looking at what's right and wrong with a motherboard from an Extreme Overclocker's perspective.

We think you will also find Randi's review perspective and approach a little different. Those who have been screaming for overclocked benchmarks in board reviews will find them in Randi's reviews.

This is Randi's first review at AnandTech, so please make him feel welcomed. Reply

PASSIVELY COOLED! That's soooo appealing. I wish board makers could get the northbridges cool enough on the AMD chipset to make more passively cooled boards. I hate having another fan in the case, especially a tiny one running at high revs making a racket. It's bad enough most GPUs suffer from that, we don't need another one on the mobo. :( Reply

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't think the audio is on the PCI-E bus. The codec hangs directly off the southbridge, and isn't on any bus. If you look at the slot the audio card goes in, it's actually a PCI-E 1x connector turned backwards. I'm assuming that they use that particular connector because it's cheaper than designing something custom. Still, not a bad job on the CPU utilization.

Thanks for pointing this out. The references to the audio connector have been corrected to "dedicated audio connector" which it is unless we hear otherwise from Abit. We have seen the separate dedicated audio card can significantly reduce CPU overhead, and Abit seems to have done well with this idea on this board. Reply

Wait, what? You are comparing a dual core HT enabled system with several other Intel systems using only a single core? How is this apples to apples? This makes all of the benchmarks you did worthless. Reply

ALL tests used the exact same CPU except the Workstation test results. That means general performance, encoding, DX9, and DX8 gaming were tested on all reported platforms with the Pentium D 840EE.

The Workstation Tests were included because they were an interesting picture of a 3.6GHz single core being soundly outperformed by a 3.2GHz dual-core Pentium D. The workstation tests were meant to be an illustration, not a direct comparison.

The 3.46EE was used in some past memory tests to achieve high memory bus speeds, and the reference was only made in examing overclocked memory FSB speed records - not comparative performance.

We will make this clearer in the review, but all of the benchmarks except Worksation are definitely apples to apples tests - even down to HT being enabled in all tests. Reply

QFT ... what's the point in testing a new board while conveniently slipping a new processor into it as well? That's akin to "Let's compare this Accord versus this Corolla, oh and by the way, the Accord has nitrous, aftermarket shocks, aftermarket brakes, aftermarket muffler ..."

Thanks for an article that shows that dual-core is better than single-core in multi-threaded applications ... funny, I thought Anandtech did one of those articles a while back ...

eh, not so impressed myself. what ABIT did looks expensive and it doesn't get the job done adequately. DFI includes temperature controlled fans in their BIOS, which makes their fans bearable. A nice thing about Nforce 3/4 boards is that you really only have one chip to cool.

Who exactly is Abit targeting with this board? Who games with Intel? A64s are cheap, nforce 4 boards are cheap, and they perform better. I realize that in the corporate world, there are people out there that only use Intel, but I figured gamers were different. I just can't see this board really being that popular. Reply

I got an Abit NI8 SLI with an extreme processor and 4 gig of ram. The problem is that to takes forever to load. I've tried it with windows xp pro and windows 7 can anyone tell me what I chould check any tipsReply